Austin, TX:

The sun sets slowly on the North-facing hillside. Dark-skinned Texans linger, legs-wide, loading their dayswork into pickups; speaking Spanish. Pastel houses, half-completed, promise the not-too-distant arrival of middle-class whites (liberal, to be sure) to fill up the expectancies of this 'Green Community', as the Aguave Villas signpost calls it. Soda cans and rags lie piled in a trench by an unpaved driveway, of a non-existent house, where a 13-year old boy sits before his absent window, straining towards solving as yet unfathomed equations.

New Orleans, LA :

A black bean burger and guitar advice from Marilyn Manson's original lead guitarist (or so his girlfriend told me). While drunk as he was, he accused the bartender of practicing voodoo, Mississippi John Hurt playing on the jukebox. Lay Me A Pallet On Your Floor. And could she have, or would she have. But who was she, or who was I? As she walked to the jukebox and playfully chose Heart's 'Magic Man'. As the guitarist began to argue with the delta bluesman beside him – white as he was, the both of them were – about Ozzy, and Zappa, and RL Burnside; the New Orleans night turning into morning, and people still surviving, flood waters still subsiding.

And only a cool night, a gray night, a winter's impossibility – in an open-eyed city, a bloodied city raging with murder and corruption, but friendly – she walks down the street talking on her cellphone and still says hello friendly, caught well up inside itself friendly, where histories of such diversity, of blues and jazz born sandwiched between a lake and the river's almost-delta might close themselves. Where enough is enough and no more. But more. And more.

How will we save this city? This impossible, below sea-level city – in which so much of us is implicated, wherein so many of us were born – of slavery and intermarriage, crossing border and language and any hope of achieving the blessings of the familiar, swollen into one another, pregnant with circumstance, with color, with death and life woven, hope-fear tied, tied to a past that's no more. And more. And more...

Athens, GA:

After driving south on interstates 95 and 85 for almost eleven hours (through Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina) I arrived in Athens, Georgia on the eve of Andy Reid's gutsy game-on-the-line who-drew-this-up 4^th and 15 play call, still filled with hope. Mike, a friend from home since middle school, moved down here from Philadelphia roughly a year ago. He's working at a local restaurant and living with a UGA business school student (and football nut) named Alister, as well as Alister's girlfriend Sabrina. Upon arriving at their place, I ate a little bit of pasta that they'd made earlier, and we went out into the college town night to see a Guns-n-Roses cover band - dressed appropriately in 80's hairs and sneers. I can't say too much for the music. Fake Axle and Fake Slash stayed after the show talking to some ladies, many of whom, in their early 20's, as seems the local custom, are probably already engaged, married, or grandparents. The streets teemed with caucasian college students, and awfully pretty girls. As the clubs closed, we gathered into Allister's car and head for a Waffle House, feeling adequately southern. The hashbrown menu is ample, even if the potatoes themselves are not.

As Mike explains to me, in Athens, “they like their bar games”. Whether it's billiards, darts, poker, watching football, or drinking beer, there's work to be done. On Sunday night, we played poker with some of Mike and Allister's more colorful friends. Wayne, our host, some amalgam of Ronnie Van Zandt (RIP) and Al from Home Improvement, was already good and drunk by the time of our arrival. He was quite hospitable, and self deprecating as to the consistencies of his misfortune - earlier that night he'd lost an $120 coin flip to Robin, the third of three bearded fellows (his is, fittingly, red) amongst our group of seven. Some gamblers just always seem to bring along their own shovels. But hey, god bless em if they're willing to laugh a little whilst they're a-diggin'... Wayne even managed to not get too upset when, he and myself being the last two folks in on a particular hand, another player prodded me to call an apparent bluff. An indicative appearance.

In the end I finished the night up $15, the first time I've ever done anything but lose quickly in playing poker. It made my insides feel kinda warm, tingly; but that was probably just the wad of singles pressing shyly against my left thigh. I walked back to the car, smiling like a born-again stripper, in the wee morning hours, a pocket's full of tips.

So I sort of trailed off a bit, but...

Back from Europe, after five television-filled months spent slumbering in my parents basement, I've taken once again to direction. A new direction. This time westward.

I've cobbled together my books and my clothes (and even a Nintendo 64), and packed them tightly into a car not quite my own, but borrowed - from my parents - for a short time; and a long journey.

I'm moving myself to Portland, Oregon; in search of adventure and employment (preferably adventurous). I'm cutting a slightly jagged route through the American continent, extended beyond the distances that any reasonable pioneers might have chosen, for themselves, as an apt (or timely) path westward.

I'll be visiting old friends, in places I've never before seen. And then, I suppose, I'll be figuring out my life, or some modicum of what may as well be called my life, an adult life, in the real world - big old scary world it be.

Question: Would something like this ever be allowed on the side of a building in America?

Now I'm not saying you really need something like this (it's a random collection of heavy metal lyrics) on the side of a building, but I found it pretty interesting to stumble upon in a place which fails to legally guarantee freedom of speech (although I guess you don't really have to stumble upon this, as it is rather in your face).


Anyway, the 'Diesel Wall' seems to be a pretty cool idea - they have a contest every year that's open to the public to create a design for the wall, and this is what happened to win this year. Along with all the graffiti and murals (Nike put up some beautiful ones for the World Cup with their logo only barely noticeable), the parks and open greenspace it seems to be indicative of a generally different take that Berlin has toward civil engineering and the role of private enterprise in the organization of public space.

7.01 - Frankfurt: France vs. Brazil

6.22 - Nuremberg


5:30 on a Thursday morning. An alarm ringing, then another. The shower grabs me and provides some minimal waking. I put on my clothes.

Nick and I are meeting Paul and Katrina at the Hauptbanhof at 6:30 to catch a train from Berlin to Nuremberg. Dressed modestly in their Uncle Sam hats, patriotic t-shirts and flag-capes, Nick and Paul have tickets to see the U.S. play Ghana at 4 pm. Ticket-less, I have on a stars and stripes cowboy shirt, and Nick's American Spirit truckers hat, while Katrina, British, is without stripes, though she makes her best attempt at being supportive in a red shirt, blue stars painted onto her face.

The station's escalator-separated levels shine an immaculate silver in the still early light, as a respectable number of Americans gather around us on the platform. I buy a loaf of bread, drown it in Nutella, then rescue it with some mouth to mouth. Aboard the train I try to read, and sleep, and wonder whether, after Germany, I'll ever be able to bear riding on Amtrak again.

We arrive in Nuremberg around 11:00. Aesthetically, it's immediately recognizable as Bavarian - for its architecture, as well as the shape and adornment of its non-football-migrant natives: old women wander about wearing afro puffs; no self-conscious Berlinese styles to be seen.

As we're not meeting Rajah, the guy with whom we are staying (a student of history and dreadlocked reggae DJ, as well as Katrina's former Turkish roomate's best-friend's brother), until noon, we stumble around looking for food, and come upon a gathering of fans.

“We are sorry,
we are sorry,
we are sorry,
you will lose”

echoes the drum-accompanied Ghanain chant (loosely to the tune of 'Oh My Darlin' Clementine'). We begin to grow nostalgiac for once-simple dismissals of other people as less human or evil, for differences unexplained and unpsychologized, for the encompassing sense of stability and self-assurance which such dismissals afford; I smile and think of Morbo, the alien news anchor from Futurama. Morbo: "Hello little man. I WILL DESTROY YOU!" We smile at the Ghanains, wish them luck, and take a few pictures. May the best team win, etc, etc.

After dropping our stuff off in Rajah's room, which he's graciously letting us use for two nights while he crashes at his girlfriend's, he takes us to a grocery store to buy some beers and whiskey. We buy some beers and whiskey. Hopping onto the S-bahn beside a bunch of American fans and a few Mexicans, in short time we build a wall (only a football wall, though, you know, covering our testicles, it's not that we're pro-NAFTA or anything)

Getting off the train and walking down the platform, 'The Star Spangled Banner' , 'America the Beautiful' or some other such not-altogether-interesting anthemic tune mysteriously begins to emanate from our increasingly licquored-up procession. We swing our arms and bounce on the balls of our feet, bemoaning the many Germans dressed up in Ghanain gear: is this simply motivated by geopolitically understandable anti-Americanism or a deeper Germanic urge to exotify (especially in Berlin, the Germans seem to have an overwhelming fascination with all things Brazilian)?


We empty our bladders into the bushes, then separate. Nick and Paul head into the stadium, as Katrina and I move towards the fan mile. Trading swigs of whiskey and sharing it with any legitimate Ghanaian fans that we can find, we begin to come upon the scalpers. Having just finished reading 'Blood Meridian', I grow nervous and prepare for the worst: large and mean, shifty eyed, with capitalisms dripping from their fangs. But for the most part they generally seem like nice people. Books and covers.

The first scalper's offering a 100E ticket for 120. I don't have the money, but Katrina does. She waffles and leans both ways. The alcohol pushes her. She buys the ticket. I take up the whiskey and head on alone, swigging without a partner. 100E on my person, owing money all over town, and with nothing momentarily in my bank account (some past due funds are shortly on the way, I hope) in a short-lived urge of patriotic fandom, contradictory to all my frugality and better sense, I become increasingly determined to see the game. The scalpers swarm. My hurriedly put-together sign, states quite simply: “I NEED TICKETS”.

Yet, after the one that Katrina found, no one seems willing to settle for anything lower than 150. And even if I could justify spending an amount of money on which I could live for almost two weeks for a mere hour and one half of my viewing pleasure, frankly I just don't have it. Which is what I tell them. Which is when they leave.

Silly price fixers, don't they know this isn't how capitalism works? It's always that the market's all free and such when you're controlling it. But I have time on my side, and the unbargainwithable aid of offering all I've got. I'll even throw in the rest of the whiskey. How can they argue with that?


Eventually, as the clock ticks toward game time, a Californian who's got his own ticket but is trying to sell off his wife's (the detective in me wants to know what he's done with the body), who I already offered my 100 to but like all the rest he was looking for 150, returns and accepts my price. Taking one final swig off the whiskey, I leave the rest behind with a kindly fellow beside whom I'd been sitting on the mile. Sprinting fervored toward the stadium, I find my seat just in time for the anthem, for which I stand. And even without my dad there to prod me, I take off my hat, cause it's not about politics now, it's about football. And I'm an American, God-damn it. And it's on, Ghana. It's on.

And then the Ghanains turn it on.

And then our Weltmeisterschaft is off.

And damn it Bruce Arena, why didn't you start Eddie Johnson?

what I've been reading:

Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
Virginia Woolf - Jacob's Room
George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
Don DeLillo - White Noise
Paul Auster - Timbuktu
Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

--

Weltmeisterschaft 2006:

The air is thick with pollen, yet most eyes are on the screens. A woman wipes a baby’s bottom by a recently constructed sandbox. Youth bounces on a trampoline. 20-somethings drink beer. A Dutch striker strikes a football just wide of the Serbian right goalpost, allegiances among the onlookers not readily determinable. In this host country, the home team is not playing, nor in the same group as either of the teams which are. And yet, in the visible range of these pixelated outdoor players, light-drawn through the pollen-filled air from newly purchased projectors, on a Sunday, seating capacities are reached.


Prinz Lauerberg is at its parks and flea markets, but mostly - it is watching football. You see a stranger on the street and want to say something. Sage brush brushes past you as you pass, wordless. You do not speak German. Makeshift beergardens are thrown up in empty lots. Those well-established gather makeshift German lines outside their walls, the ones already inside hanging over, looking for their friends. Men wear flags around their necks like capes. Women paint national colors on their cheeks. Waiting to get into the beergardens, people drink bottled beer, the bottles piling up in mounds like post-war rubble affording the city its minimal topographical variance.


In German-accented English two record producers speak of violence, of German adolescents (or Belgian ones) shooting up their schools, of a boy running into a crowd at the opening of the long-awaited Hauptbahnhof with a knife, stabbing. An American recording artist sits quietly, listening. Almost overnight the lavender explodes into color.


My mind empty with the churchbells' ringing, the sun glows down as if just risen, though it is already afternoon. A thin yellow-haired-shaggy dog lies resting, half in shade, while the bells continue without sign of letting up. Two women talk, and drink tall beers in tall skirts, with their legs crossed. They smoke cigarettes, and wear sun glasses. The dog looks up at me, its muzzle browned, its presumptive master reading, sandals off, legs propped. She puts down her book, momentarily gathers the air in a smell, and drifts back to her lines. The bridge passes its walkers, and below, the rumblings of a ring train, as I return to the unidentifiable yard to sit for an unidentifiable anthem.

Berlin:

An electro-magnetic field pulses. Laundry spins. Stops spinning. You bend your left leg slowly at the knee. Stretching your calf. A bird calls. A car passes. Accelerates. Brakes. A computer tries to scan the disc inside it. A book turns its pages. Reading.

Someone steps hard against a wooden floor. Ruffles a plastic bag. Clinks a fork against a plate. You move your right leg, rolling up, onto your side. More cars. A train too.

Groaning, empty-headed, at the morning, you scratch your balls.

'The ideal political candidate is both charismatic and authentic', you think.

The curtains pulled up, the windows bending light, the door opened, the morning says “get on with it”.


Nick, showered and dressed, lies back down in his bed, lazy. “Unni saw my penis this morning” he says, then sings a Dylan line for the two-thousandth time. I fart. “This sunshine feels awesome,” he replies, though I know it’s not a woman. (He lies and says “it feels better”)

He wonders aloud if he’s ever been alone in the world, farting. He wonders if he’s ever farted at the same time as Geena Davis.

Somewhere along the German country-side a cow, chewing, thinking cow thoughts, leaks methane.

5.08 - 5.24 Paris

Shakespeare and Company:

I am staying on the second floor of this two-story bookstore, spending most of my nights on a short makeshift mattress which serves as a sofa throughout the day, and the usual napping space for a black-haired cat, named simply Kitty.

(Aside: why is it socially acceptable to name cats ‘Kitty’, while dogs always receive more respectable, god-fearing names? Is this a sign of feline inferiority? One supposes it more complicated.)

Of the regularly employed or paid workers, there are two Irishmen: Asheen and Jonathan, an Australian: Jemma, a New Zealander: Rowan, as well as another Gemma (dating Jonathan) and Sylvia – daughter of the owner (George Whitman) and veritable manager of the shop – both Brits.

Of us migrant borders, the numbers, and the people-fleshes filling them, are constantly in flux - having gone as high as six, and as low as three during my stay.

Those of the longest tenure, and with whom I've become closest, are (in order of appearance):


Omar: A mustache-wearing, suspendered San Diegan of Mexican heritage. A would-be will-be playwrite and reader of Wind in the Willows who dreams of one day opening his own bookstore, titled explicitly.

Gabriel: A side-burned Vancouverite living in Montreal who makes bagels, surfs on couches, likes Murakami and lived alone in the woods with a typewriter at a fragile age.

John: A Rhode Island native who's wandering the world. A web-site designing, real-estate selling magician who doesn’t drink. But plays guitar. And likes the ladies.


Carl: The son of a Texas bible-thumping evangelical preacher. A whacky liberal artist angered by authoritarianism. And newly home-ful in a Parisian apartment, as I understand it, and congratulate.

and Sara(h-less): An American Pole (or Polish American, not being sure which label best conveys such multi-nationality) in her gap year, which doesn’t translate so cleanly into French, on her way to Brown University with tips on teachers, exceptionally well-read, and tongued (English, Polish, French and Swahili commandeered ably at her behest).

All of the boarders must help to open up the shop at noon, and close at midnight, working two additional hours at some point during the day (which are scheduled at closing the night before). Working in the store is not incredibly difficult, as with checkout duties being left to the regulars, the main responsibility is simply to stock and organize the shelves. Yet, discounting its relative ease and the ample opportunities which it provides for flirtation with the clientele, if one should ever find oneself looking to re-inforce the fact that mastery is an infinitely unattainable ideal in this universe, then this would certainly be at least one job to look into.


We hide food beneath the benches of the library upstairs, inside drawers and small cubby holes, snacking occassionally outside the shop during the days, though while the shop is open we generally must find food elsewhere. There’s a pretty good sandwich place run by a middle-aged Asian man and woman just around the corner on Saint Jacques where you can get a sandwich for 2E, and I often have one with tuna, hard-boiled egg, lettuce and tomato, as it seems to offer the most for the price. At nights, after closing, we pull a cofee-maker(to boil water), a hotplate and pan, out from under the upstairs sink and make pasta. We mix in some beans, and whatever cheese, tomatoes or other vegetables we may have, and along with a bottle or two of 1.90E to 2.90E wine, we have a generally nice little feast.

Especially compared to Berlin, eating out in Paris, even at the cheaper establishments can quickly become expensive. So, if you're trying to maintain any sort of a budget, you need to find some sort of balance between making your own food, and simply eating sparsely. Yet, even so-balanced, one yearns for some variety: a few times splurging for Indian food, or a couple non-happy hour beers, and a few times going for the better part of a day on just a baguette and some jam.

paris photos:

The Vertical Plane:

Whether height, or virility, or simply a defiance of gravity (one might call it phallic), so many cities seem to have a building serving little purpose beyond size. A sort of benchmark's what it means to be a city, or a beacon unto country:

Here, where dreams are realized, thrown together, we'll defy those natural laws - imposed, as from above…

Come join us as we Babel…

Or lean, Pisa, lean.

Often, in the afternoons, I go to the Jardin du Luxembourg to play basketball. The court is small with one hoop, thick-rimmed, and no three point line. There’s a crowd of regulars who I recognize by sight, but not by name. Children gather on the other end of the pavement kicking footballs, rolling scooters, and intermittenly wandering into our games, interrupting them. The structure of the court seems to dictate the style of play and the particular skills which thrive there. Slashers are often the most successful, as the scoring is generally done from what would be considered the paint, though there are no markings or colors to be found. Everyone plays pretty good defense, not excessively physical, but not lackadaisacal either. Yet for whatever reason there seems to be an inordinate number of foul (fout) and travel (marche) calls, and other such trivial interruptions of the game's momentum. Though I can understand how calling these violations when they do occur can help to dissuade smaller tensions from building into a generally more angry and violent all-around style of play, I must say, as an American, I find the French to be quite petty as far as these things go.

5.08 - Paris

Shakespeare and Company: The second floor, like the first, is humid, and packed with books. These books though, somewhat disconnected from the store downstairs, are part of a private collection, a collection which long ago ceded any hold on more conventional understandings of that word: privacy. I'm reading Italo Calvino's American Diary, the fourth section chronologically (the manner of this particular collection's organization) in an English-language translation of his autobiographical writings, titled fittingly Hermit in Paris.



Though not quite a hermit, I am in Paris, sitting by an opened window's letting in the breeze, the smell of the rain-laced spring leaves, and the Seine - rolling slightly faster with the recent rain, ensnaring monuments and tourists alike within its pale-green passage. Cars pass on the roads, over the bridge, and under the gothic towering of Notre Dame. Two Italians, a boy and girl, sit beside me, smiling at one another, conversing in a language I do not comprehend, while Italo writes in English, through the medium of Martin McLaughlin.

Were this a different place, I might have had to smuggle the book upstairs. But as it isn't, I walked quietly, book in plain site, up the rickety red-wood passage, the stairs peeling paint, partially hidden, in the back right corner of the shop. They tempt you with the way they wear their footsteps, the many years of traffic, the ascending weight of sightseers and poets, and all the ones who fall - into books of every kind, into enexplicable love with stores that feel, stores of memories on old wood shelves, into the picture-filled lives of Joyce or Hemingway, or two-year-old copies of the New Yorker lying unassumingly beside them on a well-placed desk.

This place... it's a hospice of sorts, a den of invitation, which wears it's motto in a marking, like a mantra: 'Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise'.


And, though the initial luster always fades, though the magic of any perfect communion must open itself to economic and practical realities, though you discover, in time, that it is technically 'against the rules' to bring new books upstairs, and though each person that works in such a place is never entirely (or even often) hospitable, the extent of your foreigness fades, and you gather yourself into its rhythms, dirty rhythms which afford you little privacy, but rhythms nonetheless.

And it starts to feel like home...